


we must first draw them in

by owenmeany



Category: The King (2019)
Genre: Alcoholism, Fighting, Friends to Lovers, I did this instead of my assigned reading, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, and essay. will i fail? it's likely, sometimes loving your best friend and mentor be that way, this awakened my Timothée phase im not proud, tw: major character death, vaguely emotional bullshit masquerading as proper actual writing, why did i watch this film. why did i enjoy this film
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 23:01:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21346174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owenmeany/pseuds/owenmeany
Summary: He shrugged. “I am no king.”“Then what?”“Yours.” They seemed to come quickly. He felt no fear as he said them. “Only yours.”At night in a room in Eastcheap; and then beyond, to a field in France.
Relationships: King Henry V/Falstaff
Comments: 27
Kudos: 77





	we must first draw them in

The first time, which happened on his twenty-first birthday, he had been drunk and upset for some reason or another. Perhaps his brother, some imagined feeling of spite or rejection. His brother had written to him and not their father. The King who would not speak to his heir. Their father never talked; their sister was across the sea; and now his brother had changed, even in the way he wrote, which was the way he spoke, or never spoke - given that he had stopped visiting. He used to write of things that interested him or that they shared, particular memories, the pond on the edge of the grounds where they had played as children, the hours they had spent in the water looking for little green frogs in amongst the mud and the rotting tree roots. Now it was always his father’s words in parroted cursive. He did not recognise the name he signed by. He could read it, he knew it to be his brother’s. But it had never before been signed as though he were a stranger. Before he had been Thomas, Tommy, something less. Now he wrote like a king, without love or affection, except for those who were easily controlled and eager to worship.

He had been drunk initially. As the evening wore on his head hurt and he found himself sick so simply sat and watched the people dance around him. The room slid. The mustard light from the candle wavered. Big shadows crept up the wall in the shapes of his friend’s bodies and faces. If they were indeed his friends, for he saw them only at night when he had money enough to buy drink. But by the time John had sat next to him he had almost sobered. He spoke slowly but not because his words slurred. Only because to think, to put them into order and to push his tongue around them, hurt. Sluggish and slow he nodded when John asked what was wrong. Which was nothing; he said as much. 

John put a hand on the back of his neck. He did this often now, more and more, finding ways to hold him. Hal had been trying to wean himself off of the feelings it created. He did not like how he responded, or that he could not recreate it alone. His own hand on the back of his neck felt clammy and nervous and that of a woman felt coddling, or, by turns, invasive. But when John did it, the bones in his back seemed to bunch up under his touch, coil in his back, make something in his shoulders ache. A good ache. Something that warmed him wholly and naturally. 

“Are you unwell?”

He set his jaw, shaking his head. 

“What, then?”

He didn’t know. He turned. His friend seemed closer and softened by the light in the tavern. There was sweat on his brow from his dancing. 

“Still afraid to be here?” 

Hal nodded, head heavy. He had only recently begun to adjust to living in his world. Never frightened, only slow, and clumsy, like his tongue, like his head. Lumbered with guilt, trying to mimic how his friend walked and talked.

“Not with you.” He smiled. His teeth felt sharp and wrong in his mouth.

Falstaff laughed. He was very close. He leaned over and put his chin against his shoulder, resting his forehead against his neck. 

His friend had gone very still. “You are sure you’re not unwell?”

He looked at John’s neck, pressed down his collar a little with one of his fingers. His skin looked dry and thin in the light as though he had only bone with no flesh to cover it. John by contrast looked entirely alive. Warm and flushed. He pressed the muscles in his neck, ran his fingers over his throat, watched as he moved, minutely, confirmation that he was living. 

John’s own hand joined his, prising his fingers up from his collarbone. “You’re drunk.”

“Not now.” He let himself be held. John twisted to look at him. “Have you thought any more about what I said?”

He was silent. In the pause Hal pressed his fingers up against his chin, his beard, where it grew thin and coarse towards his jaw. John looked away as he did this but did not stop him.

“You do not know what you want.” He moved to respond but his brain, stuttering, took too long. “Or what it is you ask for.” He sat apart from him, one hand still held in his own, cautious and soft. “There are good women here. Anywhere. You would have the throne one day.”

He smiled. Through the light and the fog that had settled in his brain he let his face split open. Even to be acknowledged felt like a blessing. “I will never have the throne, John.” He called him by his first name. He could not close his mouth. It felt like it might betray something worse. He felt the spectre of the Bishop inside his head, being told to stand up straight, to speak gently, to follow the Lord’s prayer.

“There is more to want.” John moved his hand from the back of his neck into his hair and then left it there, still, cradling his skull. “Old friend,” he said, tasting it.

“Not if it’s you.” 

He edged closer. His clothes were beginning to fit him. At first, when he had been finding his way, which was really a period of years spent getting lost, of avoiding the palace guard, of never sleeping in the chamber he had been born in, the halls and great stone rooms he had been raised in, nothing he had found outside of his old life fit well. Nothing sat right on him, where before all had been made exactly for his body. He wore John’s clothing often and liked that it made him seem a stranger, to himself and to those that knew him. He shifted. Under his legs the threads of his shirt sleeves, unbuttoned, torn open, caught on the rough wooden shelf beneath him. He realised that he knew the walls and the ridges of the Boar’s Head Inn almost as well as the castle he had been born in. More than that, even in its decay, he found it comfortable. 

Still John would not look at him.

“I won’t have the throne. He doesn’t care for me either way.” They were linked. John glanced around but the milling bodies paid no attention, even now. Like some vision of a braided rope, John’s hand was in his, his neck in John’s grasp; a life in a life, he might have said, tried to say, if his words felt less viscous, take it, take it from me. “But even if I could, I wouldn’t.” His fingers twitched. “For you, I wouldn’t.”

John didn’t move. His eyes were glinting with that same degrading yellow tinge that hung in the room. In the light of the morning, even after a night of drink and sick, they were lighter and always clear. Instead, here, they seemed a reflection of Hal’s own, darker and darker as the movements of the crowd interrupted the light. 

“You’d give it up that easily.”

He shrugged. “I am no king.” 

“Then what?”

“Yours.” They seemed to come quickly. He felt no fear as he said them. “Only yours.”

Finally, slowly, so as not to disturb the way they had encircled each other, John turned his head. “You’re a boy.”

“I’m older than you were when you first fought.” He looked at him, searching in his face for something else. “I was a man before today and even older this morning.” John had bought him his drink to celebrate this, had let in the revellers and friends, had started their games, had had them singing - for him, in his honour, in his image. A day that he would have ignored alone otherwise.

On his head they had placed a wimple or what had once been a covering in the cut and shape of a crown, help up by thin and wilting paper. Once they had anointed him they had danced around his standing form, mocking him, with something less than adoration and sharper than respect. Now it wilted in his hair, slid off, tied under his neck, hung lopsided over his forehead where his curls fell in his face. 

John let go of his hand and neck. He shuffled back and regarded him. After a moment, still solemn, which looked ugly and unusual on his kind face, he reached under his chin to undo the string that held it there. He retied the knot and then pulled it up by its flimsy points, righting it. His hands slid down to rest on Hal’s cheeks, almost gingerly. He held his face.

“You could have much more.” There was much behind his eyes he was remembering. Not just recalling his past, he thought, but recognising his future. There were a handful of military choices he knew from stories and legend that John had been forced to make. To his advantage, of course, but also with consequence. Once he committed there was nothing to do but endure it, see it all the way to the end. In one sense Hal thought he saw that same wariness. But then perhaps he was simply clouded by the drink, which was almost through his system, but lingered just a little.

“There’s nothing else.” His voice seemed almost to break. Inverted; as though speaking silence into the air, not disturbing it but having it disturb him, force itself back into his mouth, sorry that it ever tried to make a noise at all. “Only you.”

He looked at him and then let go. He stood up, grazing his hands as he did so. He leaned over him, above him, and then stumbled back. From there he gazed in wonder and, grinning, fell to one knee, balling his fist to his chest. 

“Your grace,” he said, unable to contain his laughter. He took another man’s drink as he wondered deeper into the crowd. Hal watched the movement of his neck as he went.

*

Later in his private lodgings there would be some hesitation again, that sheet that fell over John’s eyes and indicated he seemed to be elsewhere. Somewhere loud and impactful for he seemed almost to flinch as Hal laid a hand on his shoulder. When he blinked and found himself in the room again, he smiled at him.

“What makes you stop?” Hal’s voice sounded like someone else speaking through his mouth. Desperate and scratched up. Not unlike the girls he had in his room before. 

John swallowed. In the dark Hal could not see so well but heard the sound and felt the shift in his friend. 

“There is nothing I can do to stop it once we start.”

Hal raised an eyebrow. He laughed, which made John laugh too, deep and slow. He watched the movement of his throat and felt that same collapsing low in his belly, the constriction in his chest, in his lungs. 

“I’ll stop if you want to stop.” Still, Hal thought, that desperation. As though someone else had climbed inside him and made that fondness and that awful want unavoidably strong, so that it climbed out his throat with each word. Desperate, clawing. All the way up his gullet out his mouth onto the bed between them. “Or you can leave and I won’t mind. If you don’t want me - then it matters not.”

“You think I don’t?” John smiled and put a hand on his leg, moved it gently up his thigh. It was warm and sure, the same way the hand on his neck always was. His breath hitched beyond his control. Reflexively he looked down at his knees so he wouldn’t see or feel the colour spread in his cheeks. “I do. I do.”

“Then what?” He peeled off his shirt and lay back, looking up at John from over the line of his own body. 

John’s eyes still weighed by something as he moved over him. “You must not laugh.”

He swallowed. His hand moved over John’s cheek, his thumb stroking the curve of his jaw and ear. “Never.”

Almost confessional he looked away, body still laid over his. “Once we do this I’m yours. You will be king, one day, in spite of yourself.” His breath was sweet and hot on his neck as he dipped his chin, dropping his mouth to Hal’s ear. “And if you’re king I’ll fight for you. And if I fight for you, one day, I will die.”

He lay there for a moment, the words curdling in his belly. He squirmed from under him and propped himself up on his elbows. 

“How can you say that.” Fury barely contained by his words. “How dare you. I am your friend.”

The glint in his eyes had mellowed. It was now with some creeping fear that Hal understood it was regret. Not apprehension or shame but bashful regret. As though he had anything to be sorry for, even in what he had said, to himself, to Hal. The choice, Hal realised, was already made.

“More than your friend, my lord.” 

“I would never put you in such danger.” He reached for him, tangling a hand in John’s hair. “And I will never be king.”

John smiled. “You make promises that are beyond your control.” He pushed him down, gentle and firm, and then pressed his mouth to his chest, his stomach, lower. As he undid his breeches he spoke disembodied words, gravelled in the back of his throat, as though they were for the darkness rather than the man who shifted underneath his hands. “But if it is to be this way, I would rather have you.”

Hal arched his back and swallowed. “And I would have you.” Again and again like some ritual, he spoke into the darkness. The words of the blessing they anointed on his father’s back when he took the throne, the cries they had uttered around his mother as she lay dying grey-faced in her bed, the water they had spread across his infant forehead almost in song as he was christened. “Have you, have you, have you, have you.” When he looked at John there was that same regret. But it did not deter the way he moved or his mouth on Hal’s own, or the warm hand on his neck, guiding him onward. 

*

He would see that look again. Have you, have you; in the tent, raging, almost forgetting the decade of history between them, sick, dying, waiting to die, wanting to die, wanting it to be over so that they could go home and lie on the sheets in the old and musty lodgings above a tavern in a nowhere part of the country. In some dark corner of Eastcheap. Though they could not go back and never would. Yet the way John would smile at him even whilst he shouted and spat. That hand on the neck, still kind, still loving. Have you, have you, have you … voice high and lost. Same look, same hands in the field before they fought. Drink with me, he had entreated, stay with me, as though already he knew his bones would be interred in the grasses of Agincourt. Have you, have you. His mouth on his skin, his hands in his hair. Later, that night of his birthday, and many nights after, his body next to him in the bed. He would turn and complain of the cold, the bed would creak, and clumsily John would put that hand on his neck. Have you, have you. His body in the field, looking upwards at the sky, mouth yawning open, gasping for breath, as though he died suffocating. Sliced neck puckering and his body soaked in his own and other’s blood. 

Hal had sat and cried. Perhaps, he thought later, he should have waited, considered how his men saw him. But he put a palm on John’s chest and found his eyes were blue and utterly empty, that preternatural regret gone, lifted. His body seemed smaller and lighter in the mud. Hardly a man at all. His chest seized. He looked down at the ground, destroyed by his own feet and found he could not breath. He held John’s hand in his own and even through the cloth found himself trying to coax warmth back into them. I’ll have you, he thought, have you, have you. If you would just look at me again, I’ll have you. 

*

**Author's Note:**

> literally cannot believe this dumb film, that i cried at this dumb film, that i used my precious little life to watch this dumb film, that i sat up at night to rewatch this dumb film and write this dumber fic. i would apologise to billiam shakes but timothée is first in the queue. everything about this film is funny. that they spent 6 months on his accent and it still sounds like that. that rob pats just .... Was there. the interview from years ago where joel said he wanted to make it like game of thrones. loved it 10/10
> 
> i'm here on tumblr [(x)](https://om-johnirv.tumblr.com)


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